Ian Bogost has the best piece I’ve read on video games and violence in the weeks since the Newtown shootings. Writing about the current controversy over the game industry’s involvement in Joe Biden’s gun-violence task force, Bogost makes the arugment that politicians have no interest in discussing games qua games, only as grist for what he evocatively refers to as the “discourse machine”: Whether for good or for ill, games become instruments in public debate rather than as mechanisms through which players can participate in a variety of activities—including reflecting on the very debates they now serve as puppets. I’d…